One of the ideas that is most difficult for people to get their heads around is the notion that a player can be both great and overrated. There's a tinge to the word "overrated," one that implies that the player is somehow not particularly good, even though all it really means is that he's not as good as his reputation or accolades would have you believe.
I'm thinking of this today in the wake of Tony Gwynn's retirement announcement, since he illustrates the point as well as any baseball player ever has.
Gwynn is being mentioned in some quarters as the greatest hitter since Ted Williams, with no qualification for the term "hitter." Now, Gwynn has been -- still is, actually -- a tremendous hitter for average. His .338 lifetime batting average is 16th all-time, and 10 points higher than any player whose career began after World War II. There have been few players better at hitting line drives to the opposite field than Tony Gwynn, and it's on that skill that he's built a Hall of Fame career.
The problem, when it comes to assessing his performance and putting Gwynn in his proper place in history, is that we know there's more to being a great hitter than slapping opposite-field singles. Gwynn, for all his positive attributes, didn't do those other things nearly as much as many other players.
Just to illustrate the absurdity, let's compare Gwynn to Williams:
Player AVG OBP SLG BB HR 1B XBH
Tony Gwynn .338 .388 .458 783 134 2369 755
Ted Williams .344 .483 .634 2019 521 1537 1117
The only thing Tony Gwynn did on par with Ted Williams is get hits. In every other aspect of wielding a bat, Gwynn was inferior, and strikingly so. The gap between Williams and Gwynn is comparable to the gap between Gwynn and someone like Turner Ward or Rob Ducey. The two players are simply not close in performance.
OK, this isn't the most fair comparison, but then again, I'm not the one putting the two players together. Williams is the second-best hitter ever, and most players are going to look bad standing next to the Splendid Splinter. How does Gwynn look when compared to all players who hit for a high average?
Coming into this season, 51 players had lifetime batting averages of .320 or better in a career of at least 1,000 games (source: Total Baseball). Of those 51 players, Gwynn:
ranks 35th in OBP
ranks 37th in slugging percentage
Those rankings give you a better idea of where Gwynn stands, and at that, they're generous. His rank in slugging percentage is particularly misleading because he's largely ahead of dead-ball-era hitters. Gwynn's career .458 slugging percentage is unimpressive for a corner outfielder, particularly one who spent part of his career in a tremendous hitters' era.
Rather than regard Gwynn as a peer of people like Ted Williams, look at where he ranks according to some objective measures of performance. Total Baseball credits Gwynn with 438 Adjusted Batting Runs, good for 46th all-time, and comparable to players like Dave Winfield and Wade Boggs. His Total Player Rating is 45.9, 30th all-time and right behind Bobby Grich and Robin Yount. Per 150 games, his TPR places him 63rd all-time, smack between Charlies Gehringer and Keller.
This is excellent company, Hall of Fame company in most cases, and Gwynn can deservedly block out the first weekend in August 2007 for a trip to the backwoods of New York state. He is one of the best players in baseball's long history, and unlike the other legend walking away after this season, is retiring with his skill set basically intact.
But the deification of Gwynn in the wake of his announcement, and the comparison of his career to players like Ted Williams, does him no favors. Gwynn doesn't belong in that company; he never has, because he's never put those kinds of runs on the board.
It's standard for players who hit for high batting averages to be subject to this treatment, a slow-to-die relic of the way we evaluated players for much of the 20th century. We know now that batting average is just part of a player's offensive performance, and that what he adds to his average -- walks and power -- is important. Gwynn added less to his batting average than just about any high-average hitter in the live-ball era, and as such, is overrated.
Tony Gwynn is a great baseball player. Tony Gwynn is an overrated baseball player. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive, and are instructive to remember as this Hall of Famer winds down his career.
The team of writers from the Baseball Prospectus (tm) will be writing twice a week for ESPN.com during the baseball season. You can check out more of their work at their web site at baseballprospectus.com. Joe Sheehan can be reached at jsheehan@baseballprospectus.com.
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